Friends remember business owner, city’s first coronavirus-related death

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About two weeks ago, Randy Flatau called master jeweler George Gotcher Jr. to help craft a ring. It would be the longtime friends’ last collaboration.

Flatau, who owned Randy’s Fine Jewelry on Dowlen Road for decades, on Wednesday became the first person in Beaumont to die of the coronavirus.

“I just finished a job for him about three days ago,” said Gotcher, who had worked with Flatau since the 1990s. “It was an engagement ring for one of his customers.”

In a mid-March phone call, Flatau said he wasn’t feeling well and so he couldn’t ship a package to Gotcher.

“I told him he had the label and to just send it when he could,” Gotcher said. “The next day, I asked him how he was and he said he might have a virus and that he had to wait and find out.”

Gotcher said he communicated with Flatau through text messages over the next few days.

“Then his wife called me and told me he was in the hospital,” he said.

Darrell Troppy, a local artist, said he met Flatau on a visit to the jewelry store about 25 years ago. In the quarter century he knew him, Troppy recalled the jeweler facing an occupational hazard on more than one occasion. Flatau proved himself a merchant to be reckoned with.

“He got robbed three times,” Troppy said. “The last time he got robbed, I think I made it to the hospital before (Flatau’s wife) Teresa did. I looked at him and asked him if he was OK. He just looked at me and said, ‘I got him.’”

In 2012, a man posing as a customer entered Flatau’s business before pulling a gun to rob the store. The man shot Flatau in the leg and tied him up, then went to empty the safe. Despite being wounded and bound, Flatau managed to reach a gun he had under the counter, turning the tables on the man, whom he shot several times before police arrived.

Troppy said Flatau made several pieces of jewelry for him.

“I would always look at the picture of him on the counter, which was him looking at the jewelers table as a kid with a loupe on his eye,” Troppy said. “I would just think, ‘Wow, you knew what you wanted to do as long as I did.’ He had certain standards he lived up to that people liked. He was a great storyteller. There were several times I would go into his store for 20 minutes and end up staying there for two hours.”

Troppy expressed sympathy for Flatau’s widow as he recalled experiencing the loss of friends to a different emerging illness decades ago: the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

“I really feel sorry for Teresa,” he said. “She is still in quarantine and didn’t get to say goodbye. I called her back last night. It’s hitting home for me all over again, because I watched more than 100 friends of mine die in the early ’80s. Until it happens to you and someone you know dies, it is not going to sink in. It’s like, ‘God, I have to live this all over again?’ I worked at a bar in Houston. I knew everybody. I didn’t go to very many funerals. I’m guilty of that. It was so final and permanent.”

In Flatau, the coronavirus pandemic claimed a man Gotcher described as a business owner who could brighten anyone’s day.

“Every time I would talk to him or answer his phone calls, he always had an upbeat story,” he said. “It was always about helping out a little old lady or someone who didn’t have enough money. We would try to work out something to get something on somebody’s finger that didn’t have the money to get it done. … He was always helping the people. That is just how he was. His eyes were full of love when you met him.”

Beaumont City Councilman W.L. Pate said Flatau was a consummate professional and a better person.

“It is a real loss for our community,” Pate said. “He was an excellent example of what small business in America is all about. He was about the people he served. He did not try to sell people things. He wanted to help them get what they wanted.”

Troppy said he plans to help Teresa Flatau organize a memorial for her late husband within a few months.

“It’s not just my loss. It’s the community’s loss,” he said. “If it were anybody, I would’ve never expected it to be him. I literally had to sit down when she told me. I talked to him two weeks ago. I had asked him if he had his bullets loaded in case they tried to rob him again.”